Jane Edwards
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has selected two research teams to develop technologies for a program that seeks to automate the process of integrating scalable defense mechanisms into integrated circuit chip designs and help improve the security of the semiconductor supply chain.
Northrop Grumman will work with IBM, the University of Florida and the University of Arkansas as part of the Automatic Implementation of Secure Silicon program, DARPA said Wednesday.
The other research team includes Synopsys, Boeing, Arm, UltraSoc, Texas A&M University, University of California in San Diego and the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research at the University of Florida.
The AISS program has two main research areas that seek to address four security vulnerabilities: supply chain attacks, reverse engineering, hardware Trojans and side channel attacks.
The first research area will focus on the development of a “security engine†that integrates industry and academic research technologies into a platform that could help defend chips against attacks. The second research area seeks to integrate the security engine into system-on-chip platforms.
“The ultimate goal of the AISS program is to accelerate the timeline from architecture to security-hardened RTL from one year, to one week – and to do so at a substantially reduced cost,†said Serge Leef, AISS program manager at DARPA. “AISS will drive revolutionary advances in design productivity and have a dramatic and positive impact on our electronic supply chain security."
